Ask Ken

by Ken Blackman Jan 18, 2014

Q: I've never really been able to last long in sex without coming but recently in the last 6 months or so it's actually been worse. Its putting stress on my relationship with my girlfriend. I was wondering if you had any suggestions?

A: Here's my thought and my experience on the subject. First of all, I think you have the cause and the effect reversed. Because it's stress-induced. PE ("premature ejaculation") is any ejaculation that happens before you wanted it to. Making it a big deal creates a vicious cycle, because the more you try to control it -- the more you think you're supposed to control it, or think you should be able to control it -- the more sex becomes subtly or not-so-subtly stressful. And that stress causes the "problem" to get worse. We're at our worst when we stop remembering that our bodies intrinsically do the right thing. Sex and especially climax is supposed to be an involuntary experience. To the degree you are not fully able to let go and go fully into your involuntary, the sex will start to get clenched and tight and the flow gets blocked like a kinked hose.

I can tell you how it goes for me, you can modify to fit your situation and your relationship. Generally when everything else is good I don't have the feeling that my ejaculation is a surprise or happening at the wrong time. On those occasions when I could feel it coming on quickly, I'd say—

Hey, if you keep fucking me like that I'm going to go over.

And just me saying that would shift something in the energy between us that would have us keep going. I got into the habit of doing this before it got to the point where it was stressful and both of us are blaming me for something I was supposedly doing wrong.

I've had a ton of conversations with partners about what we each were experiencing in those moments. I highly recommend this. I was surprised at how often it was performance anxiety on my side combined with a drop in sensation on her side. Sometimes, upon reflection she realized she was feeling done and had started to fuck to go over, and in the process took me over instead. Or it was a point where she wasn't feeling as much and was fucking harder-and-faster to compensate... but meanwhile her partner (me) was still feeling a lot.

So where most guys focused on PE try a bunch of different things - whether it's a physical technique or a mental trick or a penile salve or whatever - that are all basically various ways to desensitize, our focus is actually on sensitizing her body so she's feeling as much during sex as I am. (Queue OM pitch, the "velvet glove", etc.) So that during sex, all the tiny, subtle movements and skin contact becomes amplified, and barely moving at all becomes intensely pleasurable for both of us. And in the process, being that sensitized we feel deeply connected, so much so that our bodies are basically responding in sync. Because our antennas are way out to here—they're reached out so far that we're living inside each others energetic bodies.